Kotkin: The Myth of GOP Decline
As the fine print says, past results do not guarantee future performance-and there are some surprising countervailing factors that could upset the conventional wisdom of Republican decline," says political analyst Joel Kotkin.
"To be sure, most Latinos these days vote Democratic. But they also tend to be somewhat culturally conservative. Almost all are at least nominally Christian, and roughly one in four is a member of an evangelical church. They also have been moving to the suburbs for the past decade or more--a trend that is of great concern to city-centric Democratic planners.
"A more integrated, suburban, and predominantly English-speaking Latino community could benefit a GOP (assuming it eschews stridently nativist platform). After all, it wasn't so long ago that upward of 40 percent of Latinos voted for the likes of George W. Bush, who won a majority of Latino Protestants.